


100 Themes Challenge #6 - Starvation

by Yunimori



Series: 100 Themes Challenge [6]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: 100 Themes Challenge, Damaged Shockwave, Drabble, Emotionless, Gen, Mind Control, Shadowplay Shockwave, Short One Shot, Skywatch, Starvation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2019-10-25
Packaged: 2021-01-03 06:50:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21175214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yunimori/pseuds/Yunimori
Summary: 100 Themes Writing Challenge.Please read tags for possible issues. 100 Themes Challenge drabbles may not have a proper summary.It seems Skywatch didn't know much about the robot they were keeping under their control. Thankfully they allowed Shockwave enough moments of lucidity to rectify that, at least a little.





	100 Themes Challenge #6 - Starvation

**Author's Note:**

> I'm copying all of my Shockwave and Optimus/Shockwave ficlets and drabbles from my tumblr accounts over to my ao3 account. Most of these are going to be incredibly short (hence the drabble tag), and either in short-form format or 100 Themes Challenge format.
> 
> This is just for my own peace of mind, making sure they are safe from tumblr's random purges.
> 
> However, feel free to read them and let me know if you enjoyed them!

He could remember that he was used to not eating. From his memory files, Shockwave had access to the fact that he used to live on coffee and little else, though everything else surrounding that fact was hazy. 

By logical leaps, that meant he should not be feeling the physiological symptoms of starvation _now_. Or at least, not feel them while he was lucid. By all rights, his body should be used to going without, thus requiring a lot more than standard to make him start showing symptoms. 

Of course, he knew he was also used to almost nothing _now, _as it was both annoying and time-consuming to inject his nutrient port with enough liquid to constitute a meal in one sitting. “Now” being a relative term, meaning “before Skywatch grabbed him and made him a mind-controlled slave”. 

He was lucid enough to realize that, and lucid enough to realize that despite the _logic_, he was still showing symptoms of starvation. Dizziness, weakness, pain in his gut, and an all-pervasive brain fog that he thought had little to do with Skywatch giving him a moment of increased clarity. He’d had those before, and the fogginess wasn’t generally part of it. They liked him being able to _respond_, so he could understand just exactly how much of a hold they had over him.

Not that it frightened him. He was incapable of fear, or any other emotion. Which seemed to antagonize the humans, but there was little Shockwave could do about that, nor did he really want to. He did want them to not have control over his body anymore, but he had yet to figure out how to get rid of their little mind-control device or the bomb currently stuck to the inside of his chest armour. 

This starvation thing was something new, though. It was…painful, to say the least, and made him wonder. As they were giving him a moment’s reprieve, allowing him clarity of thought, if not of movement, it made Shockwave speak up, something he rarely did while being restrained in one of Skywatch’s large mechanical bays. “How long has it been since your kind last fed me?”

“…you’re a robot, you don’t need food.”

The tone of the human’s voice was something Shockwave couldn’t identify, though it sparked a nebulous memory. It was one of the things he once knew, then. “I am a living being, despite your belief to the contrary, and I do require food. I am showing symptoms of starvation, which leads me to believe you have not fed me in quite some time. I am aware you’re planning on killing me when you are done with me anyway, but until then, nutrition of some sort is something of a requirement. Unless, of course, your plan to kill me is to let me starve to death, in which case I believe I shall work on detonating the bomb in my chest to save myself the pain of it.” 

As expected, the vague threat of destroying their bunker was enough to make the human ‘at the controls’ so to speak get someone else, higher up the food chain, to come in. It also meant they took firm control of Shockwave again, so that he had little room to think, much less react outside of the whims of the humans. Still, he’d made his point, and next time they allowed him some kind of lucidity again, his stomach felt less empty. Still not full, still rather painful if he allowed himself to think on it, but it was enough to delay the onset of starvation again.

He didn’t really want to know what they’d fed him, or if he had told them what he could eat with the port in the side of his neck during one of their controlled questionings. Not being dizzy was enough; it freed his mind to work on other things, such as slowly working out how to rid himself of his captors and their mind control, so he could go back to _work._


End file.
